How to read PPC performance in Google Ads and Meta Ads

If you run your own PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, or you’re new to digital marketing, the numbers in an ad report can be hard to make sense of.

To know whether a campaign is working, you need to follow more than one metric. Which ones depends on:

• the goal of the campaign;
• the stage of the buying journey you’re targeting (the sales funnel);
• the platform you advertise on.

It helps to group metrics by funnel stage. The funnel describes the path from the moment someone first hears about a brand or product to concrete actions: clicks, conversions, and ultimately calls, quote requests, and orders.

Ten questions behind the most-used PPC metrics

In our experience, these ten questions tell you how your Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) campaigns are doing.

1. How many times were the ads shown? Am I visible enough in my market?

• Impressions: how many times an ad was shown.
• Search impression share: the impressions you got on Google Search divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to get.
• Reach: how many people (accounts) saw the ad. It’s one of the core metrics in Meta Ads.
• Viewable rate: the share of measurable impressions that were actually viewable. It estimates how many impressions people really saw.

2. How much do people engage with the ads? Are the ads interesting and relevant?

• Click-through rate (CTR): how often people click an ad after seeing it.
• Engagement rate: how often people interact with an ad after seeing it.

3. How much traffic reaches the website?

• Clicks: every click on any part of the ad counts. One person can click more than once.

4. How much do I pay per click?

• Average cost per click (Avg. CPC): what a click on the ad costs, on average.

5. How many visitors take a valuable action? (A conversion is any valuable action: a call, a message, an email, a submitted form, or an order.)

• Conversion rate: how often, on average, an interaction with the ad leads to a conversion.

6. How many orders or leads were recorded? (This depends on the business and on how the account is set up.)

• Purchases: how many purchase conversions were reported.
• Leads: how many lead conversions (quote requests, sign-ups) were reported.

7. What does a valuable action cost, on average?

• Cost per conversion (Cost/conv.): the average cost of the conversion the campaign is optimized for.

8. How much did I spend in total?

• Google Ads (Cost): the total paid for all clicks across the account’s campaigns.
• Meta Ads (Amount spent): the total spent on all ads in the account.

9. What is the value of the orders the platform reports?

• Purchase value (conversion value): the reported value of orders placed on your site.

10. What ROAS are the campaigns delivering? How many times does ad spend come back as sales on the site?

• ROAS (return on ad spend): conversion value divided by ad spend. A ROAS of 5 means €5 in reported sales for every €1 spent on ads.

Learn to ask the right questions

The answers to these ten questions cover the core metrics we look at when we review a PPC account. Every platform has many more, and specialists use them in more detailed reports, but this list is a solid starting point.

Keep each campaign’s goal in mind. For a traffic campaign, cost per order is the wrong yardstick. For a reach campaign, website traffic isn’t the point either, because the campaign has a different job. And if your goal is a higher account-level ROAS, cost per click becomes secondary. Pick the metrics that match each campaign’s objective.

One last thing: the numbers in an ad platform are reported by that platform. Compare them regularly with the sales and leads you see on your side, in your store backend or your CRM.